The soldiers went home to their waiting wives, to their glad children, and to the girls they loved--they went back-to the fields, the shops, and mines. They had not been demoralized. They had been ennobled. They were as honest in peace as they had been brave in war. Mocking at poverty, laughing at reverses, they made a friend of toil. They said: "We saved the Nation's life, and what is life without honor?" They worked and wrought with all of labor's royal sons that every pledge the Nation gave might be redeemed. And their great leader, having put a shining band of friendship--a girdle of clasped and happy hands--around the globe, comes home and finds that every promise made in war has now the ring and gleam of gold. There is another question still:--Will all the wounds of war be healed? I answer, Yes. The Southern people must submit,--not to the dictation of the North, but to the Nation's will and to the verdict of mankind. They were wrong, and the time will come when they will say that they are victors who have been vanquished by the right. Freedom conquered them, and freedom will cultivate their fields, educate their children, weave for them the robes of wealth, execute their laws, and fill their land with happy homes. The soldiers of the Union saved the South as well as the North. They made us a Nation. Their victory made us free and rendered tyranny in every other land as insecure as snow upon volcanoes' lips. And now let us drink to the volunteers--to those who sleep in unknown, sunken graves, whose names are only in the hearts of those they loved and left--of those who only hear in happy dreams the footsteps of return. Let us drink to those who died where lipless famine mocked at want; to all the maimed whose scars give modesty a tongue; to all who dared and gave to chance the care and keeping of their lives; to all the living and to all the dead,--to Sherman, to Sheridan, and to Grant, the laureled soldier of the world, and last, to Lincoln, whose loving life, like a bow of peace, spans and arches all the clouds of war. THIRTEEN CLUB DINNER. * Response of Col. R. G. Ingersoll to the sentiment "The Superstitions of Public Men," at the regular monthly dinner of the Thirteen Club. Monday evening, December 18, 1886. New York, December 13, 1886, THE SUPERSTITIONS OF PUBLIC MEN, MR. CHIEF RULER-AND GENTLEMEN: I suppose that the superstition most prevalent with public men, is the idea that they are of great importance to the public. As a matter of fact, public men,--that is to say, men in office,--reflect the average intelligence of the people, and no more. A public man, to be successful, must not assert anything unless it is exceedingly popular. And he need not deny anything unless everybody is against it. Usually he has to be like the center of the earth,--draw all things his way, without weighing anything himself.